ShriDurga

I've sometimes been curious about sellers posting items at prices well beyond reasonable, like the guy now listing an RH1 at ebay for $2500. I sent him an email and asked if he would accept $2400. He replied that he couldn't ship to my country! I would think for that price arrangements could be made. Or maybe he was simply giving as good as he got. ;-)

I don't remember this one! http://www.culturepub.fr/videos/sony-minidisc-caught-in-the-act

I do remember these days well. I have been without a proper home system now for 5 years: only laptops, MD, a Phillips mp3 player, a pair of headphones, and a couple sets of ear buds. (CNN) -- For many years, it was a rite of fall. You moved into your dorm room or new apartment. You started unpacking the car. And the first thing you set up in your new place was the stereo system: receiver, turntable or CD player, tape deck and speakers. The wires could get tangled, and sometimes you had to make shelving out of a stack of milk crates. But only when the music was playing on those handpicked CDs, mix tapes or (geezer alert!) vinyl records did you move in the rest of your stuff. Daniel Rubio wouldn't know. To the 23-year-old, new dorm rooms and new apartments have meant computers, iTunes, Pandora and miniature speakers. "All I had to bring was my laptop. That's pretty much what everyone had," says Rubio, who attended Emory University in Atlanta and now works for a local marketing and communications firm. "It was actually pretty good sound. It would get the job done." "Get the job done"? That sounds like the white flag for an era that used to be measured in woofers and tweeters, watts per channel and the size of your record collection. Indeed, the days of the old-fashioned component stereo system are pretty much over, says Alan Penchansky, an audiophile and former columnist for the music trade publication Billboard. "What's happened in the marketplace, the midmarket for audio has completely been obliterated," he says. "You have this high-end market that's getting smaller all the time, and then you've got the convenience market, which has taken over -- the MP3s, the Bluetooth devices, playing on laptops." He wishes more people knew what they were missing. At its best, he says, audio reproduction has "a religious aspect." "There's a primacy to audio," he says. "It's a form of magic." Wires and jacks Of course, new technology changes things all the time. When was the last time you bought a roll of film for your camera? Still, for a long time -- and for a certain, often youthful, audience -- the stereo system was a point of pride. Greg Milner, the author of the audio recording history "Perfecting Sound Forever," remembers the process. There were components. There were boxes of tapes and CDs. There might even be some vinyl. It could be a pain, no question. The equipment was heavy. There were all those wires, plugs and jacks -- Line In, Line Out, Aux, Phono, CD, keeping track of the positive and negative strands of speaker wire. It was an effort just to break down and set up the stuff, never mind moving it. Milner, for example, grew up in Hawaii, and when he went away to school in Minnesota, he had to figure out what he was going to do with his system. Whole stores were once devoted to stereo components. That hasn't been the case in years. "I remember agonizing, what do I do? I can't take my stereo," he recalls. "There was this thing that, looking back on it, took up a ridiculous amount of psychic energy." Audiophiles vs. AM radio However, he observes that the history of audio technology has often been one of convenience. Even in the '50s and '60s, when stereo sound first became widespread, the audiophiles had their hi-fis -- and the younger generation listened to tinny AM radios and cheap phonographs. Indeed, music styles had a lot to do with music consumption, he points out. Audiophiles listened to classical and jazz, music from clubs and concert halls. On a good system, you could hear every pluck of a violin pizzicato, every inflection of a jazz singer's vocal, recreated in your living room. The kids, on the other hand, listened to cruder rock 'n' roll. "The seeds of the decline of what it meant to own a stereo were planted way back then, because the original audiophiles were people who were baby boomers' fathers and mothers," he says. "As rock 'n' roll starts to become more of a thing, a lot of that stuff is produced so it's meant to be heard on AM radios." A Phil Spector Wall of Sound production -- in glorious mono! -- would probably have driven a hi-fi enthusiast up a wall, says Milner. The mass market moves on In the '70s and '80s, the twain did meet, for a time. Rock and pop music production techniques improved. At the same time, grown-up baby boomers, now working adults, invested in better audio equipment, all the better to listen to Steely Dan's "Aja." There were whole mass-market stores devoted to audio gear -- Sound Trek, Hi-Fi Buys, Silo -- and no issue of Rolling Stone was complete without several ads for turntables, cassette decks and equalizers. But technology marched on, and so did change. Some was for the sake of convenience: Cassettes had more hiss and less range than LPs, but were more portable -- especially when listening on your handy Walkman or boombox. However, we also started focusing more on visuals. Penchansky traces the decline of the stereo system to the early '80s rise of the music video, which brought visuals to the fore. Suddenly, the concert hall in your living room -- or the audio imaging in your head -- was gone, replaced by surrealist pictures overwhelming the television's tiny speaker. That branch of consumption has helped lead to the home theater. Penchansky has nothing against HDTVs and 7.1 systems, but believes that, for the most part, it's a "sonic compromise." With a pure audio system, "There was no way that television, even today, simulates the realism of visual experience the way (good) audio can simulate an audio experience." Sure, technology has adjusted. New materials and processing technology have improved the sound of small and inexpensive devices, says Patrick Lavelle, president and CEO of the consumer electronics giant VOXX International, which manufactures such brands as Klipsch, Acoustic Research and Advent. Headphones and an iPod And there's still a consumer market for good audio, adds Geir Skaaden, an executive at the high-definition audio company DTS. The top-selling products in Apple Stores, after Apple's own devices, are headphones, he says. (DTS recently introduced technology for an immersive system called Headphone:X, intended for mobile devices.) Still, convenience still rules. Which means it's out with the component stereo system and in with the computer. That suits Rubio, the Emory graduate, fine. He grew up in a house with a component system but doesn't believe he's missing anything. "All you need is a good pair of headphones and an iPod and that's pretty much it," he says. Milner, the author, can't question his decision. "Now, why even bother?" he asks. "If you can take your entire music collection and more in something that fits in your pocket, why would you not do that?"

Or just another marketing gimmick? How exactly? By delivering high definition audio in stark contrast to the compressed mp3s that the common music consumer is used to through the likes of iTunes and streaming services like Spotify and Deezer. Pono plans to change the attitudes of the average music listener by providing ‘lossless’ audio (re: better than CD/mp3/stream quality), with [Neil] Young reasoning that once people really hear the difference, they won’t be able to go back. http://www.tonedeaf.com.au/news/international-news/340337/neil-young-preps-ipod-killer-as-battle-with-sony-looms.htm

http://flyingfullforceblog.wordpress.com/2013/09/18/new-minidisc-additions/ Maybe someone should send him an email and ask him to join us here. Or maybe he's already among us?

http://dubdotdash.blogspot.com/2013/09/straw-poll-on-minidisc-1995.html

Can we start a write-in campaign to request they also release Hi-MDs?

Ever since my first MD back in '96 I have used the cloth pouches provided by Sony. I once bought a little bag like yours, but ended up not using it much.

R900, that's not me. Thanks for sharing your story, though. I think we've all had that experience of losing something dear. But then we get older - and sometimes wiser - and realize we're going to lose it all, so there's no use crying over a lost minidisc.

Go to Japan. Blanks in the electronics retailers, used hardware in the pawn shops.

Finishing MiniDisc Posted on 2013/07/26 by danreetz At 14, I bought a microcassette recorder to record touch and signalling tones. Turned out to be a lot more amusing to record my adventures with Doz (we called him Brando, then). We made so many tapes. Miles of songs, jokes, sketches and music. Our friendship set in rust. Around 1999, Doz got a MiniDisc recorder. An MZ-R37. It was a glorious thing. Sleek, digital, optical. We mic’d our exploits, friends, bands, bus stops. It felt like anything could be valuable. So we recorded us. Usually with a joke in mind. We graduated and I spent my first memorable year away from him. Got my own recorder. I was exploring new environments, new phone systems, new friends and old tunnels. I documented everything with a scratchy microphone stuck to my collar, and the peculiar scrape of MiniDisc recording in my pocket. I think I had an R90, then. Later, a Sharp MS722. Note the giant Motorola on my belt. Captured: Darkness. Spooks. Caverns. Ghosts. Some five years later I moved to Russia and recorded hours of teaching class. Phreaky sounds of the crossbar telephone system in Obninsk. Trains, busted elevators, conversations with Ksiu. A lot of empty hallway sounds, for some reason. Think I just liked the echo. Yeah, I really invested in MiniDisc, even though I knew Sony was a shit company. You see, the problem with MiniDisc, fundamentally, was that it recorded digitally, but you could never get the sounds back out digitally. Recordings were pristine and alive – and you took the damned audio cable out, plugged the MD into your computer’s crappy line-in, and re-recorded the whole thing into a .wav file. In other words, if you recorded an hour, you needed to record for another hour to make use of it. Schizophrenic Sony’s music division did not have the vision of its hardware division, and they took that capability away. Their right to publish MD trumped my right to use my own recordings. Trumped my pocket slice of the skip-proof magneto-optical future. Pained a lot of folks. After fully ten years of losing market share to CD and MP3, MiniDisc finally died. But Sony, with uncharacteristic charity, gave Minidisc lovers one final gift. The MZ-RH1. $399 MSRP. This was the machine we’d all been dreaming of. It didn’t do grating things like forgetting your recording levels every time you turned it off. And it read every MiniDisc format, ever – even stepchild NetMD. And it let you upload them to your computer, digitally, with no generational loss. It would have been perfect, except that Sony made it dependent on the ugliest, shittiest user-hating software you’ve ever met. SonicStage. Sony must know this, too, because they don’t even let you download it anymore. You have to get it from filesharing sites and use user-modified files to get it installed and working. So I never bought an RH1. I was a grad student in a program paying poverty wages and I set field recording aside. My MiniDiscs got their shelf wear goin’. Sony stopped makin’ em. I didn’t care. Five year old recordings got older. The building shit itself. Well, I care now. I have cash to resurrect the past. Seemed that five years on, an RH1 should be about a hundred bucks on eBay. Well, they’re not – working RH1′s go for more like $500 to $1000. Unbelievably, the format’s dark patterns actually made it appreciate. So I watched them on eBay and Craigslist for over a year until I managed to snipe a couple at a good price. One came in a mini-cooler full of cat hair. Thank you, Craigslist. Then the fun began. First, I had to locate each and every MD I’d ever recorded – and a few that others had recorded. Then, I had to figure out what they contained. The librarian in me decided to number the discs sequentially from 1 through 80. The cataloger in me decided to listen to each one on fast-forward, and to write the content on the outside of each disc with a marker. The lazy bastard in me decided to line them all up and take a very high resolution picture of the set, so I could refer back to each disc. Searching through each disc turned out to be as emotional and inspiring as it was brutal and frustrating. It took a whole day, from beginning to end, to hear them all. As it turns out, I don’t like my Old Self (or Young Self, really) nearly as much as I like my Now Self. While pictures lend themselves to great stories years after the snap, recordings of exactly what I said ten years ago mostly just make me bothered with me. They also make me miss all the dead folks and the old ghosts – Josh Nordwall in particular. Elijah Nies. People I just can’t find anymore. Goodbye, Josh. I can finally hear you now. The good thing about this became obvious only after going through dozens of discs. I’m not some football player staring wistfully at trophies from my halcyon days; I’m a developing human, hacker, and maker who’s better than he once was. If I liked my old self better, that’d be backwards. Extraordinary people were a part of this, even if they didn’t last long. Speaking of backwards, I had a hell of a time getting useful stuff out of these MDs. SonicStage, the digitizing package, names all the files according to the CURRENT date – not when they were created (which probably wasn’t stored on the disc). While it has the capability to convert the ATRAC *.oma files into .wavs, it just dumps them in a folder OUTSIDE the named and dated folder it created for the OMAs. Ultimately, I named each folder according to the following scheme: Given an estimate of 6-10 minutes per disc digitizing time, I thought I could finish this project in a day or a weekend. As it turned out, it required about a week of on-and-off digitizing plus a couple full days of thinking, hearing, labeling, and remembering. Overall, it was worth the work, and I am very glad to be binding these MDs up in plastic for long-term storage. To never use another deliberately crippled piece of shit to capture people that I love. They’re in a sealed storage case with dessicant and I hope to never open them again. What emerged from this effort was the intrinsic cruelty of perfect memory. When Josh died, he forgot our conversations. Time edited the soundtrack in my mind, and we became less combative, headstrong, and bold. More loving and less specific. But there on the disc were a few hours of unedited exactly-what-happened. And while they were all small transgressions I learned that I don’t necessarily want everything captured. Particularly the small things. Especially with 100%, instantaneous, perfect recall. Pettiness, I think, is best left to dust. … <small>Postscript: I take great joy in starting new things and recording new data. However, this joy is also a burden. I have dozens of mostly-finished projects pressing. The last 5-6 months of this year are going to be spent on Finishing Things. This is the first thing I’ve Finished in a while. Feels great. Next…</small> http://www.danreetz.com/blog/2013/07/26/finishing-minidisc/

A Love Letter To The Humble MiniDisc by Ian Hawkins 26 July 20132 Comments While it may never have the romance of vinyl, the news that Sony have stopped making Minidisc players is sad. Another fondly remembered technology bites the dust, so long old friend.... To look back on the past is to see the ocean we have travelled, pulled by tides and pushed by currents through storms and calm, and memories are buoys plotting our lives. These markers are songs, flavours, objects, and occasionally something unexpected: I couldn’t tell you what we were dancing to in the year 2000, but whatever it was, my summer soundtrack lived on a minidisc. The minidisc sits between the CD and the MP3. The early promise of the CD – Tomorrow’s World said they were unbreakable – was turning sour. CDs are many things, but incorruptible they are not, as anyone who has tried to change one mid-sex before wiping down their hands with a lint-free cloth will agree. The limitations of the CD became obvious when they tried to make the players portable: anyone who bought a Sony Discman soon tired of the jittery sound experience, the device falling into disuse even before the batteries had run down, which in those days was about when you reached the bottom of the driveway. The gentle glide with which portable CD players had to be coaxed from A to B at least popularised rollerblades (of which, sure enough I had a pair in 1998). The minidisc solved all this. Encased in plastic, the disc was protected from dust and KY jelly alike. It was smaller even than a cassette, you could name the tracks so they ticketed across a liquid crystal display, and the content could be ordered and shuffled much as on an MP3 player (though there was only an hour to play with rather than x thousand tracks). You could lend to a friend without having to enable their computer, delete unwanted tracks, and they even came in snazzy jewel cases to assure you that you were inhabiting the future: next up, the silver onesie and a flying car. What went wrong? Timing. My father drummed into me the importance of buying quality: brought up in the 50s, he liked things to be solid, reliable, lasting. When dad shattered his kneecap on his own home-made coffee table, he took the four subsequent operations as the ultimate compliment to his craftsmanship. Convalescing, he sat with his foot on the offending (and unharmed) table, his brain on Mogadon, watching movies on Betamax. Though I didn’t know it at the time, this was a scene loaded with symbolism. Sadly, the minidisc was an evolution in a revolutionary world. Pencil in hand, the designer sits at his desk and begins to construct from the component parts of celebrities, the perfect woman. Imagine his horror when, instead, off the production belt rolls an unholy portmanteau of his ex-wives. Such is the minidisc. Like the designer, my father makes the most of what is, rather than what could be: high fidelity was his mantra until he went deaf. His was an infinitely adjustable stack of equipment that could deliver only to the listener who gave this shrine of valves and turntables their rapt attention. Today, it’s a question of volume in an entirely different sense: so many songs in so small a unit. And the medium dictates the message: songs are produced to sound good under compression, and as teenagers play their songs through the gnat’s-chuff sized speakers of a smartphone, bass lines are inaudible. So sure enough, some recent releases have no bass line at all. Reproducing music used to be the responsibility of a piece of furniture; today, it’s another thing that your mobile does between calls. This is old news to the British Library who have amassed weird devices for extracting the sound from an even weirder collection of media. Wax discs and magnetic tape are at least analogue and easy to play; when it comes to digital media – CDs, minidiscs, MP3s – it’s not enough to read the zeroes and ones. They have to be decoded to make sense. Minidiscs are most secure data storage system ever to reach the mass market. Extracting that data decades hence may prove difficult. I accept that the minidisc is never going to have the romance of the vinyl record.Vinyl fans rhapsodise about the experience, physical and auditory, of gently nestling the needle into the crackling groove. Sliding a plastic square into a slot, so a hidden laser can read data doesn’t stimulate the senses in quite the same way. It’s a midnight campfire against a microwave oven. My minidiscs reside in a shoebox in the attic, immune to the ravages of time, awaiting conversion to MP3. And as the last song reaches the Cloud (or whatever we have by the time I get round to it), I shall box up my minidisc player, and deliver it to the British Library Sound Archive so that our descendent anthropologists can hear again with perfect clarity the sound of 2000. http://sabotagetimes.com/reportage/a-love-letter-to-the-humble-minidisc/

By Laura Northrup July 30, 2013 Earlier this year, Sony discontinued their Minidisc format. We didn’t report on it at the time because the real news may have been that Minidisc players, the most portable music format of the ’90s, were still in production. The format never quite took off unless you like to record and bootleg concerts. The invention of the MP3 player and small digital recorders made the Minidisc player adorably obsolete, but it does still have loyal fans. Maybe they should get themselves to Walmart. Reader Knah found this Minidisc player marked down to $79. http://consumerist.com/2013/07/30/raiders-of-the-lost-walmart-find-surprisingly-recent-minidisc-player/

Anyone tried one of these? From the ebay description: Unique Hi-MD Minidisc Recorder-Downloader and iPod Docking Stereo Boombox Finally Two Competitors in One : Hi-MD and Ipod plus Alarm and FM Stereo , All digital with Remote Control for IPod , Rewind/Forward ,Pause, Stop, Repeat , M.Bass , Memory Set , Sound Volume Set , Equalizer , Alarm , Sleep ,FM , Input switch , M+/M-, Ran St., 1-9 buttons, AL1 , AL2 , Power On/Of, IPod Lift/Tilt eject . This Modified Combo is Not available in any store worldwide Hi-MD can be powered by USB or 1xAA Size battery and Boombox is powered by Worldwide Automatic Switch AC 100-240 Volt or Battery 8 x “C” Size . So you can use it anywhere Worldwide at your Home/Office/Kitchen/Bedroom simply plug in to your AC outlet or by using battery you can take it to the beach , picnic , park or garden, and is small enough to be used as a deluxe travel alarm clock . Listen your Hi-MD recordings or Ipod recordings , and if you have Wi-Fi you can listen Streaming Online Radio , talk over Skype , Watch YouTube , Movies , Concerts etc . When you connect Hi-MD through Boombox USB out to USB in to your computer, you can download music , Store/View DATA, VIDEO, TEXTS to Hi-MD . You can record in to Hi-MD via Analog your MP3 in real time or do it in the Mix with Microphone ( Audio + Voice ) two 3.5mm plugs are located on the rear side of Boombox along with MD USB plug in . NOTE: Sony does not support Win7 & Vista, BUT - I will send you SonicStage for Windows 7 and Vista ! Boombox has very nice crystal clear sound with m.Bass , powered by 3-Way speakers . Built in amplifier will plays your Hi-MD , Ipod , FM Radio and AUX in MP3 music and total power gives you - (equivalent to 2 x 22.4 W) 16 Watt of Stereo Clear Sound

Posted a cartoon.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20582769 http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/music/news-and-features/time-to-rewind-cassette-celebrates-50th-birthday-1-2671039 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20556330

Minidisc Retro says he has 300 units! See his recent photo for the MZ-R50: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Minidisc-Retro/135998173205740

If it has been sitting for a while and not in use, then no. If I wish to disconnect shortly after using it, then yes.

64bit Windows 7, had no trouble last week using the same ports, software, hardware. Since last writing, I tried reinstalling the driver. No luck. Reinstalled SS, No luck. The RH1 is connected to the computer via USB cable. Put the disc in - nothing. Not even the ACCESS message. Just like it's dead. I unplug from the computer and start play on the unit (the remote is not connected). The machine recognizes the disc. I press stop then plug back into the computer. VOILA! SS now reads the disc.

I'd like an MZ-M100 or RH10, if anyone has one they'd like to part with.

If you don't mind, I'll use this thread to post some trouble of my own that appeared only this week. I don't use the RH1 much so was surprised to be discovering problems. Last week I transferred some albums in Hi-MD via Sonic Stage using the RH1. Same as usual, no problems. This week, I can't get SS or my computer to recognize RH1. Tried rebooting the computer, using a different USB drive, different MDs - nothing. The RH1 display flashes ACCESS and just hangs there. What gives?

Hope it was worth it and he is able to repair his unit.

Sounds like a movie projector. http://alaudio.co.uk/death-of-a-minidisc-player/

Never heard of Jogglers until I stumbled on this MD conversation at a Joggler forum. It appears we have something in common, an abiding interest in a forgotten technology. http://www.jogglerwiki.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=787&p=14133

The worst thing about MD is Sonic Stage. If you are travelling for long periods, MD is fairly useless for acquiring new music unless you also happen to have a computer with SS installed. So some kind of drag-and-drop feature would be greatly appreciated.